Dreaming
by L122yTorch
Summary: Olivia's thoughts become consumed with Elliot. What happens next is up to her...   I have no idea where this is going, hence the M rating :P


It's been getting worse and worse.

Liv does her best to focus on the frozen noodles that she's pouring into a pan on the stove. The empty silence that fills her apartment seems unbearable. She's trying to focus, she's always trying. Elliot was all she could think about.

Standing in her small kitchen with a wooden spoon, she slowly stirs the noodles and puts the steam lid back on. She sighs and looks at her phone, waiting for her dinner to be done.

Just another frozen dinner. A frozen dinner meant for two but made for one. It seems like everything around her is a reminder that she's alone; even the damn pasta.

_Elliot's probably at home, playing with Eli, kissing Kathy on the cheek as she makes dinner._ The thought sends a pang of hurt through Olivia. All she wanted was for him to be happy…right?

But as the years drug on, she had inevitably fallen in love with him. But he was never hers, probably never would be. He couldn't be hers because Kathy found him first, because Kathy got pregnant with Eli, because Kathy was his wife; in a loveless marriage, but still his wife.

She loved the job, she was the job, she could never leave the job, she could never leave Elliot. She saw him everyday, sat across from him for more than a decade and patiently she has awaited the day that she would get over liking him, but that day never came.

A heavy sigh escaped her lips and for a moment she shut her eyes and saw what she always saw behind them; his beautiful blue eyes. Trying for years to push past her "crush" on Elliot had been futile, and lately she found herself slipping into daydreams about him.

In her daydreams he was divorced, he was there and ready and waiting for her. Telling her that she was his everything, that she was all he needed. For daydreams, they were startlingly detailed thoughts. She could picture his baby blues looking straight into her soul, she could imagine the cologne coming off his jacket, she could feel the warmth of his grand smile and imagine what his kiss would taste like.

Unfortunately that was not reality, him loving her back couldn't be a reality. And a racking sense of loss and sadness engulfed the reality that she was driven back into.

Her cell phone alarm was going off, her noodles were done. The reality was that it was just another long day of work, just another lonely night and a frozen dinner to cap off an unremarkable week.

She set the heavy plate down on the wooden table with a thud and plopped into her chair. She sat for a moment in silence, looking down at a rather large portion of Chicken Florentine & Penne and gripping her forehead with her right hand.

In that moment she wondered if Elliot thought about her half as much as she thought about him. If she haunted his thoughts and appeared in his dreams, if he lived and breathed the fictitious reality that she so desperately longed for.

Liv honestly wondered how long she could fight this. Elliot was all she could think about anymore. After a rough day at work she would lie in bed and envision his arms wrapped around her, his hot breath whispering into her ear that "everything would be alright," until she fell asleep.

And in the dreams that followed she would often see his face. Good or bad, he was always there. Waiting for her at work in real life, or waiting for her in her head when she couldn't be near him, he was always there.

It was beginning to feel toxic, to be thinking about him so much, but once she started she couldn't stop. It started at the very beginning, when they first began working together. She'd think of a scenario where they were having a conversation, she'd picture things she should have said…or shouldn't have. And as the years went on the daydreams began to focus more and more on what he was wearing, on what he smelled like, on what his glance made her feel like. And now here she was, going to bed nearly each night with the lingering taste of a sexual fantasy riding on her last conscious thoughts.

_This has got to stop _she'd say to herself one day and she'd manage to get through the next without a single daydream and the day after that it would all come flooding back. The grand accomplishment of making it a day without him filling her thoughts would be dashed once more.

Every single day her heart broke. Especially when she saw pictures of him with Kathy, or when Kathy dropped by the office or when he spoke of her (which he rarely did).

On their last case she called his cell phone and she answered it. She cleared her thought and continued telling Kathy what was meant for Elliot. It was those small things that seemed to drive the dagger in just a little deeper. 

She ate dinner, she washed the dishes, she watched some mindless garbage on TV and put on her silk nightgown. Her sore feet tread along the cold wooden floor until she reached her soft bed. A small noise escaped her throat as she pulled herself into a cocoon of blankets. Reluctantly she turned off the light on her nightstand.

Her room went dark but her eyes remained open. At first everything was dark, then her eyes adjusted. She saw the streetlight's illumination slip through the cracks of the blinds and sprawl across the adjacent wall. She was grateful for the steady hum of the heating. She could feel the warmth spreading across the room.

Her eyes floated to the ceiling, her closet doors, her dresser, and somehow, taking all of this in just made her feel more alone. There were no pictures on her dresser, no men's clothes in her closet, it was just her. And sometimes it felt like the dark of the night would simply swallow her whole, and sometimes she wondered if it would matter if it did.

She didn't want to close her eyes…to see his face…to picture him lying next to his wife in bed. The thought made her stomach turn. _It's insane how much you can love someone without being loved back,_ she thought. In that moment she wished that she could return every moment she had spent thinking of him, wondering about him, worrying about him…loving him.

Olivia closed her eyes, ignoring the bright bask of her neon green alarm clock telling her that the hours were passing; that she was getting no sleep.

She rolled over for what must have been the sixth time and finally fell asleep.


End file.
